Theatre Review
From the opening spectacular, “Disco rescue”, through the standout numbers “I’ll be back” and “I’m a friend of Sarah Connor” to the show-stopping “Hyper-alloy combat chassis (Super fun! Super sassy!)” this show has it all.
Adapted from the screen, the stage version sticks with the same simple premise. And given it’s worked so well for everything from Me and My Girl to The Lion King, why not?
If you’re not familiar with The Terminator, Me and My Girl or the Lion King, the premise is this: A killer robot is sent from the future to the 1980s to assassinate a woman whose unconceived son will grow up to be the leader of the human resistance against the robots who are exterminating the humans in the future. To save humankind, the rebel leader sends one of his own soldiers back down time to get his mother pregnant and stop the robot killing her so the leader can be born a bit later in the past and grow up to lead the resistance against the robots in the future, which is his present.
It’s not just the simple universal story which makes the show so appealing. From the opening scene the audience is in raptures, carried on a wave of euphoria by the stirring music, the stellar performances and the immersive staging.
Unfortunately, the whole thing falls apart catastrophically with the finale, “There’s a storm coming/I am the storm/I am the saviour/” sung as a triplet across time between Sarah Connor, The Terminator and John Connor.
The song is dreadful: tedious, confusing and extremely offensive to Mexicans. Halfway through, the tide of audience opinion turns. Before the song has even finished the show has been panned on Twitter, the cast ostracised from the musical theatre community, the director outed as a racist and the orchestra humiliated in a series of (quite funny) memes.
In the end, there is no applause, no encore. The theatre is empty, save for the discarded shoes and other personal effects lost in the stampede. All that remains is the stench of failure. Brilliant. Encore. The Spirit of the Future
